The End, page 17
Simon was there, too. He thinks he still loves me, and I have to force myself to be mean to him to get him to stop. He shouldn’t waste more of his time on me. It would have ended between us sooner or later, but he only remembers the good things because he’s scared to be alone and he thinks I’m the solution to everything. He deserves someone who can give him what he wants, but that person isn’t me. I don’t want to belong to anyone but myself. But it hurts because I still like him and he’s one of the best people I know, but now I have to cut him away with surgical precision, snip snip, so he doesn’t think there’s a chance we’ll get together again, it’s better for the both of us if he gets it. I wish it could be different.
Now I don’t have you or Simon. And I don’t recognize myself anymore. I don’t know who I am in this world, the way everything is now.
Writing this makes me feel a little bit better, as if I’m already talking to you. The problem is you can’t answer me, and I need your help I think.
I’m so scared all the time, that’s why I can’t stand still. I talked to Stina, Simon’s mom. She’s a priest, did you know that? I needed to know what she thought would happen when we’re all dead. Dad’s become a Truther and is convinced I’ll go to hell if I don’t get baptized at their church. Unbelievable, right? My lovably dorky dad has started acting like a crazy priest in some horror movie. But I had a good talk with Stina. I like her. She managed to calm me down about a few things. Then she said she wished I believed in God, and I asked her if she wished it because that way I’d get into heaven, and she just laughed and said I’d go to heaven anyway, but that it would easier for me to have someone to turn to in this life. I thought that was nice. I would like to turn to someone I believe in. But, honestly, heaven feels like as much of a threat as hell, because I can’t think of ETERNITY without wanting to throw up with panic. I hope that everything just ends and that afterward you don’t have to know anything and never have to think again.
I think I get it now, why you didn’t want to see me when you got sick. I didn’t get it then. I was sad and hurt and tried to hate you, but now that I know what it’s like to be told that you’re dying, I don’t want anyone to look at me and try to save me.
But I think I need to be saved. I think I’ve been running from myself for so long, that I won’t find my way back until it’s too late. I just don’t know what’s going to happen if I stop. It’s been going on for way longer than everyone thinks. If I don’t stop to think about it, it’s not that bad and I try not to let people get too close. I pretend to be friends with Elin and Amanda and the rest, but it’s never real or deep. Not like with you.
There’s only one other person I can really be myself with. He makes me laugh, sometimes without meaning to. Other people would say he’s A BAD INFLUENCE, but he listens without judging, and I know he’d never tell anyone else. I’m writing this at his place and IF HE’S TRYING TO READ THIS OVER MY SHOULDER, HE CAN STOP RIGHT NOW. He’s a little (okay, A LOT) obsessed with space, and was long before we knew about the comet—he has a telescope and says that soon we’ll be able to see it coming. He told me that a few years ago, they found a solar system around a dwarf star called Trappist-1 and there should be habitable planets there. It’s forty light-years away, which is inconceivably far away, but still pretty close considering space is INFINITE (nearly threw up again, it’s as bad as ETERNITY). NASA looked at it through their telescopes and tried to figure out what it was like over there. And it occurred to me that if someone out there is LOOKING BACK AT US???!!!? they’d see the Earth like it was forty years ago. That’s the light that reaches them now. Maybe they’re seeing our parents, but they’d still be kids, and we wouldn’t even be born yet. We are in the FUTURE. It’s such a wild thought, but nice, I think. It’s like we get a second chance.
I’ve got to stop now. Maybe sleep if I can. Will reread this letter before I send it because I’m like 100 % fucked up at the moment. I probably sound disturbed. But you always got me when I was acting like a weirdo. TAKES ONE TO KNOW ONE. Haha.
Hugs. Love. All that jazz.
Tilda
I didn’t cry when I was reading the letter at Caroline’s house. My brain took charge. I knew this was my only chance to find out more, and I didn’t have time to wonder if what I was doing was wrong. So I waited until Caroline busied herself with something in the kitchen. Tilda hadn’t logged out from her social media, and her laptop was connected to her phone, so I could read her messages. The police had probably done the same thing, hunting for the same things I was: clear threats to her life; plans to meet someone in North Gate. There wasn’t anything like that. But there were other messages. Both before and after her death. Someone had stolen her phone and pretended to be her so that no one would come looking for her. They stopped the day after Tilda’s body was found; at that point, there was no use pretending anymore.
I took pictures of the things I needed more time to think about, maybe look up. Then I said goodbye to Caroline and thanked her for letting me read the letter. I held her while she cried, and still didn’t feel anything. I couldn’t even comfort her about what happened at the fellowship hall yesterday. My own tears only came when I got back home.
I can’t remember the last time I cried like that. I didn’t even know I could do it.
Afterward, I was utterly exhausted, like I’d run a marathon.
Can you cry? Or do you have some other way of venting?
I’ve spoken to Simon. He’ll be here soon. He deserves to know what Tilda has to say about him, how much he meant to her.
Maybe we end up helping each other. I need him. And he needs me.
He didn’t kill Tilda. I know that now.
The doorbell’s ringing. Write more later.
SIMON
Amiddle-school-aged girl opens the door. She looks just like the Lucinda in Tilda’s old photos.
“Hi. I’m here to see Lucinda,” I say, and try not to use that fake-sounding grown-up voice I hated at that age.
“Who are you?” She looks at me skeptically. “Are you a Truther?”
“No. I’m her friend.”
The girl doesn’t seem convinced. And it hits me that not a lot of people have visited Lucinda in the past year.
“I’m Simon,” I add, and that seems to pique her interest.
“Were you dating Tilda?”
Impatience starts to creep up on me.
“Lucinda told me to come,” I say. “Maybe you could get her.”
“Wait here.”
The door slams, and I hear the girl screaming Lucinda’s name inside. In the meantime, I gaze out at the garden, where the apple trees are heavy with unripe fruit. The sunset washes the air in golden colors. Cress in red, yellow, and other fiery tones spills over the edges of a flower bed, almost like it’s trying to make the most of the final time it has to bloom.
I try to spot Tilda’s house, but it’s hidden behind the tree canopies.
And soon it’ll all be gone.
Tilda understood it before I did. She didn’t close her eyes to what was happening. What did she think about when we lay on the floor of her room? She was so quiet that I thought she must have been asleep, but she was watching the news—she couldn’t tear her eyes from the broadcast. Had she decided to break up with me then and there, as I was holding her? When I told her I loved her?
The door opens behind me.
“Come in,” Lucinda says.
She’s wrapped a cardigan around herself and is wearing her knit hat indoors. She seems tired; it looks like she’s been crying. I follow her into the hallway and step out of my shoes. The house smells nice. Clean. Cool. Freshly aired out. On the wall opposite the hat rack, framed photographs of family members from different eras hang so close together they’re touching. In the middle is a picture of a bride and groom on the beach. The man is blond and a little sunburned. He’s wearing a pair of glasses with wire frames so thin they’re hardly visible. The woman is taller than him and enormously pregnant, dressed in a simple white gown. In the background, I can see a handful of dressed-up guests and someone who looks like he officiated the ceremony.
Lucinda’s parents seem happy in their wedding photos. It must have been a day full of hope for the future. They had no idea what was coming. And that beach, wherever it is, will soon be gone forever.
I push the thought away. Lucinda asks if I’d like anything to drink, but I decline. I don’t want to wait a second longer than necessary to see what’s in that letter.
We step into a kitchen, where the floorboards squeak and move almost imperceptibly beneath our feet. There’s white-painted wooden paneling halfway up the wall, and paned windows. Lucinda walks ahead of me into a corridor, and we pass a dining room, continuing past built-in cabinets and sideboards. This house has a palpable sense of history. In the past, staff probably rushed around here in neat little uniforms. Girls probably curtsied and put up with getting pinched on the ass. This has always been the nice part of town, where those who profited off the woods and the mines settled. It strikes me that back then, no one in this house would have had anything to do with a person from my neighborhood.
“I thought we could go to my room,” Lucinda says.
We walk up a staircase, and on the next floor, I catch a glimpse of a large room. The furniture and lampshades look expensive, and only someone who knew their shit would dare mix the patterns. Lucinda walks up the staircase, stopping on a landing with two white-painted doors. She opens one of them, sounding out of breath as we step inside.
I look around her room. Against one wall is a desk strewn with paper and pens, and a heap of something that looks like old diaries. A small sofa and two small armchairs are in the center of the room. The bed is messily made. A closed laptop lies on top of her blanket, and I hear its fan whirring softly. I wonder if she was writing on TellUs when I arrived.
Tilda must have spent so much time in here. Stayed the night. I walk up to one of the small windows. From between the branches, I think I can see the roof of her house. I wonder how Caroline is feeling. If she’s in there right now.
I turn around. Bookshelves cover the entire wall around the doorway we just walked through. Books are tightly pressed together or stacked on top of one another. Has Lucinda read them all?
She grabs her laptop and settles down in one of the armchairs. I sink onto the sofa opposite her. It’s surprisingly soft.
“I hope Tilda would be okay with me showing you this,” Lucinda says, and places the laptop on the round table between us.
I want to grab it. Instead, I sit completely still while Lucinda turns the screen to face me.
My eyes automatically search for my name in the wall of text.
Simon was there, too. He thinks he still loves me.
I spoke to Stina, Simon’s mom.
I take a deep breath. Start over. Read the text again and again, until the lines start to blur together.
I have to cut him away with surgical precision, snip snip.
He’s one of the best people I know.
When I lean back into the sofa, Lucinda is watching me, trying to gauge my reaction.
“Are you okay?”
“I don’t know,” I answer.
How could I be okay? How could I ever be okay again, even if I had a lifetime left?
I choke, and it feels like a sob until I realize I’m laughing. It’s like putting your finger in cold water and, for a second, thinking that you’ve burned it. I have no idea what or how to feel.
Am I happy about what Tilda’s written about me? Or does it make everything worse?
I keep laughing. I laugh so hard I’m crying, and I can’t stop. I start to feel afraid. This laughter isn’t my own. It’s a creature that has crept inside me, taken me over.
Then all of a sudden, it’s gone, leaving behind only a roaring emptiness.
“I don’t think I can handle this anymore,” I say.
“You’re not the only one.”
It stings when I wipe my eyes, as if the salt’s eating away at my skin.
“Tilda said something terrible was going to happen. It’s like she knew,” I hear myself say.
Lucinda’s gaze is determined.
“We can’t think like that. She didn’t know. You couldn’t have known.”
“I knew she needed help.”
Lucinda digs her phone out of the pocket of her cardigan.
“I want to help her now,” she says. “I want to find out what happened. And I need your help.”
I slowly shake my head. “The other night, you thought I killed her. Why have you changed your mind?”
“Because I read Tilda’s messages on her laptop.”
Lucinda waits a beat for me to react; I wait for her to keep going.
“She’d connected her phone messages to it,” she says.
I look out the window. Remember again how I held Tilda on the floor of her room. The notifications on the computer screen. Messages from people who wanted to know if she’d heard what was happening.
“Remember when we met on the dock that first time?” Lucinda continues. “You got a message from Tilda’s phone, remember?”
“Yeah.”
Everything is ok. You don’t need to worry about me.
“But she was already dead at that point,” Lucinda says. “And whoever had her phone must have killed her. Since I was with you when you got the message . . . I know you didn’t send it.”
It takes a moment for the words to sink in and make sense. Then relief floods my body. Makes my eyes water again. I had almost given up hope, but now there’s something approaching real evidence that I didn’t do it.
“Thank you,” I whisper.
Lucinda keeps fiddling with her phone.
“I took photos of some of her messages,” she says. “If we help each other out, we could find something the police missed.”
I look at her. I want nothing more than to say yes. But first, there’s a question I need to ask.
“Why do you want to do this?”
“What do you mean?”
“Everyone is going to die. What does it matter?”
“It matters. It has to.” Lucinda looks away. “If nothing matters, then everything is meaningless.” She clears her throat, tries to swallow down tears. “You were right,” she says. “I know that now that I’ve read the letter. Tilda needed me when she was alive. I owe her this.”
“And then what? What do we do if we find out what really happened?”
Lucinda looks back at me. It takes me a second to read her face—the tense lines around her mouth are suppressed rage.
“I want to look whoever did it in the eye and say: ‘I know it was you. And everyone you care about will know it, too.’ That’s the only punishment left, isn’t it? No one wants to be alone and out in the cold now.”
I, of all people, know that’s true. I wonder if Lucinda’s saying it to manipulate me. If that’s the case, she doesn’t need to.
“And besides, what’s the alternative?” she adds. “Just sit around and think about doomsday?”
I study Lucinda. Look at her phone.
Finding the person responsible for Tilda’s death would at least give the final two weeks and four days meaning.
“Show me, then,” I say.
NAME: LUCINDA
TELLUS #0392811002
POST 0026
Dad came home from work a moment ago, and Miranda happily informed him that Simon had been here. I forgot to tell her to keep it secret.
Naturally, he’d heard the rumors about Simon. We had another fight. When I told Dad about the message that exonerated Simon, I could hear how vague it all sounded. It’s the kind of explanation that invites you to undermine it. Dad said Simon could have had an accomplice who’d sent him the message from Tilda’s phone. I told him there was no way for Simon to know we’d bump into each other. We wouldn’t even have spoken if his dog hadn’t aggressively licked me. But Dad made me promise not to see Simon again.
I haven’t exactly had the opportunity to practice lying to him. Now, I’m going to have to get good at it fast. Simon and I are meeting at North Gate tomorrow to check out the place where Tilda was found. I’ve seen online that people have been leaving flowers and cards there. They say murderers like to return to the scene of the crime. Maybe Simon and I will find something.
And we’ve gone through all of Tilda’s messages. I’ll tell you more about them once I sort out my thoughts. Right now, I’m trying to convince people that Simon is innocent. His mom Judette is going to ask her friend, who’s a police officer, to call me tonight. I’ve posted online for the first time since I got sick, and wrote a text to Caroline and Klas. I just hope it helps.
I know Tilda wouldn’t want people to think Simon had killed her.
P.S.: I wonder if Dad is worried about me getting strong enough to do things by myself again. I don’t necessarily mean he preferred it when I was sick, but at least he always knew what I was up to.
He would never admit it. Not even to himself. But I think there might be some truth to it.
SIMON
Isit at the kitchen table looking at Lucinda’s post. She made it public, and more and more people are sharing it. The comments are rolling in. A lot of people are still unconvinced. No smoke without fire, one of Tilda’s old teachers has written. I know he still goes to the school every workday, preparing lessons no one will attend. But what really pisses me off are the ones who thank Lucinda, writing that they knew I was innocent all along. Where were they when I needed them the most? Ali has written, too, asking for forgiveness, but when I asked him if we could meet up, he told me it wasn’t a good idea. That cowardly fuck.
I try to hold on to the fact that I’m not alone anymore. Lucinda is on my side now. We have a plan.
Judette’s in the bedroom talking on the phone with Maria. Emma’s gone to bed. Only Stina and I are still in the kitchen. She’s stuffing empty cans into the trash. She smiles when our eyes meet.
